Is BitBarista the First Autonomous Corporation?

Is his fantastic novel The Dark Net, Benjamin Percy imagines a near future where autonomous corporations come into existence. While the book focuses on the negative aspects of this possibility (you think corporations are unethical now?), the concept itself is ethically neutral. And, we may finally have our first autonomous corporation—or at least the groundwork for it.

BitBarista is a self-service coffee machine. That in itself doesn’t make it noteworthy, what stands out is that it accepts Bitcoin for that coffee. Further, it can pay out Bitcoin to people for performing maintenance tasks to keep it running. All of this is controlled by a Raspberry Pi, making it self-sufficient.

The important idea here is that no human interaction is required to run the BitBarista business. Once it’s setup, it has the capability to keep running itself all on its own. If it runs out of coffee grounds, it can pay someone in Bitcoin to come refill them. If it needs cleaning, it can hire someone to come do that.

While BitBarista is mostly a proof of concept from the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Design Informatics (it’s just a Delonghi coffee maker running on a Raspberry Pi), it represents a key shift in the way we think of corporations. Who is running them? If the goal is profits, what about ethics? Or, it could just represent a way to get coffee without talking to a barista.